England's Exposure Notification App Entering Trials as Engineers Work Out Bugs

[McScooby]

I think there are some PII and national security issues there, preserved or otherwise. And you would put the hundreds of languages on one developer. In Scotland alone we need English and Gaelic and potentially Polish and a few others minor languages. How do you get people to install an app that may or may not be sending data for an external power? Even in the EU we aren't going get people to trust a app made in another member nation.

FFS, we don't need languages other than English at launch, what we need in Scotland is to get widespread testing and get the App out ASAP!
This is not a time for words or niceties.
I'm not a developer in any way shape or form, but my understanding is the API allows a skin to be put on it, the heavy lifting is done by the API. Time is a great luxury to do things you would like to do, the priority as of months ago should've been to get this out & worry about the languages etc at a later point as this is a must do.
It's not like NI have a gaelic language or anything!
I'm sure that irrespective of the language used the design process of the app is identical.
The longer we leave it, the more disruption to society and people's lives in both senses of the word.
Cynical as I am, I'm thinking that England's taking the time for 2 reasons - the NHSX contractor's are milking this for as much as they can (they already took £250m before admitting the 1st version of their app didn't work) and the second is to find a way to pillage data as much as they can.
Scotland cannot use the excuse again that at least we're not as bad as England, after all, how did NI & other countries manage it?

 

[manu chao]

According to the news, even the best application of the Google Apple API today achieves a 45% false positive rate, where 45% of people picked up as close contacts are NOT close contacts. That means for every 11 actual close contacts you pick, you pick an additional 9 people who are not close contacts. Bear in mind even those 11 close contacts are not necessarily people at a genuine risk of COVID. From this perspective, you can understand why some public health authorities will not want to force people to isolate on this account, and would instead prefer to alert people and ask them to be cautious.

But those 55% would the ones an idealised manual contact tracing would count as people to be contacted? So possibly exposure notification apps will result in false positive rate that is about twice as high as is achieved with manual contact tracing (in regard also to testing all people identified by either means). And note that manual contact tracing can also misidentify people (as having been in close contact), lists of attendance at various venues probably overestimate the number of people in close enough contact. But EN apps will catch some contacts that manual contact tracing cannot because they are anonymous encounters in locations that don’t log attendance.

And is quite possible that we need to adjust our response to various methods, the proof will be in the pudding, the positivity rate in those identified with EN apps.

 

[szw-mapple fan]

That sounds like defeatist nonsense to me. A suitably engineered app would provide hooks for subscribing authorities to implement their own workflow where required.

You just described what an API is.

 

[LV426]

You just described what an API is.

No I did not. I described a general purpose app that itself has the means to interact with third party systems, not an API that a third party app can consume. I develop APIs for a living. I also develop apps that consume APIs. I also develop apps that trigger third party behaviours. Which is why I remain unconvinced that a general purpose app is not feasible.

 

[obamtl]

But those 55% would the ones an idealised manual contact tracing would count as people to be contacted? So possibly exposure notification apps will result in false positive rate that is about twice as high as is achieved with manual contact tracing (in regard also to testing all people identified by either means). And note that manual contact tracing can also misidentify people (as having been in close contact), lists of attendance at various venues probably overestimate the number of people in close enough contact. But EN apps will catch some contacts that manual contact tracing cannot because they are anonymous encounters in locations that don’t log attendance.

And is quite possible that we need to adjust our response to various methods, the proof will be in the pudding, the positivity rate in those identified with EN apps.

At the end of the day, one can understand why the UK is happy to notify people but not lock them down for now, and why they continue to apply pressure on Google and Apple to improve their distance algorithms to be as good as what the UK had built previously. It’ll be a win-win for everyone when the API is improved to that standard.

 

[Madonepro]

I don’t expect any government to be perfect but I expect them to do better than America or the U.K have. A bit like other comparable countries actually have done. You are doing the typical thing of assuming everyone criticising governments expected them to be perfect. We just (rightly) expect better.

I have plenty of compassion for the avoidable deaths and job losses, less so for the politicians making the decisions.

And what is the yardstick you use to determine better? No country is, all are failing at some point. There is no magic book on how to deal with this. Of course we want better, but you also have to understand how incredibly hard it is to make decisions based on hypothetically probability.
Enjoy the sofa you sit on and use to make your vitriolic commentary, but don't assume you can run the country, and cure the pandemic from it.